Linkspamming the night away (11th May, 2011)

An open letter to the Australian SF community: However, the venue staging was awful, in terms of its accessibility. High, and only accessible by temporary stairs, the stage was off-limits to anyone in a wheelchair, anyone in an electric scooter and anyone with a significant mobility impairment… This should not be acceptable to us as a community in the twenty-first century.

As benno37 says: Tip to open source developers: don’t name your library after a sexist/offensive/illegal activity. I’m looking at you upskirt! Seriously, wtf. (So that not everyone has to google for the term, upskirt is a library to parse the Markdown syntax for webpages. The Wikipedia page for Markdown has loads of alternative implementations to choose from.)

Confessions of a Fairy Tale Addict: Because it is a lifestyle choice, to write fairy tale books. Make no mistake. I mean, in our culture, the phrase fairy tale practically means: trite, lightweight, and fluffy. You know, girl stuff.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious, freelish.us or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Antenatal classes in my experience are almost exclusively focussed on labour/delivery and the few days either side: basically, managing early labour with or without carers, managing late labour with carers (usually), managing neonatal parenting, especially breastfeeding establishment, with or without carers. It’s certainly an interesting news item, but it’s not a longer term parenting class or even attachment class, unless antenatal courses in the UK take a longer view than they seem to in Australia.

The “Brocial Network” is yet another urrrgh example of how many men entirely fail to take responsibility for being perpetrators/predators/expoliters/abusers because the broader culture says that it’s expected.

The idea that it’s up to women to protect themselves from the inevitable assaults — verbal, physical, privacy violations, objectification etc is perpetuated in a number of insidious ways, and one of them is victim blaming. And it’s so entrenched. The article linked below, and the tragically inevitable comments, provide a clear example of the pathological way that discussions about how slut-shaming is wrong and sexual harassment is the fault and responsibility of the perpetrators generate responses in which commenters blame the victims in the examples of victim blaming cited in the article on how victim blaming is wrong!

However someone feels about slutwalk as such, I think this article and at least the first ten or so comments are worth reading for the breathtaking clarity with which it illuminates the depth of the “yeah, but it’s the fault of the victims” belief in (at least parts of) our culture.

Sadly but understandably, the name of the conference and its organizer is not disclosed.

It is appalling that sexual harassment and discrimination is not outlawed in this industry. Florian Leibert, the harasser who was identified in the incident last November is still working at Twitter. Why haven’t the founders and/or executives at Twitter taken any consequences?